Brittany Maynard Made A Choice

I think one meets the news of the decision of a person to end one's life when faced with a terminal diagnosis with a kind of sadness, naturally--death is, so far, our common fate. But I think that she had the freedom to determine the timing of her end a merciful thing. She had laid out very well her reasoning behind this decision. Her time, and more importantly, to her, her still-lucid and not dramatically impaired and reduced life, were going to be taken from her anyway. She chose the path that let her family come to peace with the hour of her choosing, that gave her control, that spared her and them seeing a bitter and painful decline.

To my way of thinking, if her life was not her own to do with it as she would, why would she be entrusted with it? If anyone gives a gift, one expects the recipient to do as they would--or the gift was never truly "given". If we are to have anything like free will at all, ending our lives is also a choice. One that has no continued consequence for ourselves this side of the veil, only continued bill-paying and meals and remembrances for those surviving in our wake.

The argument against her choice is, by now, moot, but still, fairly dumb. I feel bad calling up the yammering thing that is still called Pat Robertson (I think his mind may have already gone over the hill to meet the fairies, himself) to point out the dumbest argument, but here it is: